Pushkin. Hello Tim Harford here with a bonus episode of Cautionary Tales. Today. I've got a story about someone I think everyone should know about, a trail blazing entrepreneur who changed the way we think about tech, redefined roles for working women, made many members of staff millionaires, and founded the first autism research charity in the UK. This episode is sponsored by Chase for Business, and joining me again is their CEO, Ben Walter, who also hosts the very
excellent podcast The Unshakables. Ben, Welcome back to Cautionary Tales. How are you doing.
I'm great, Thanks for having me, Tim, Although I'm very cold. I'm in New York City. It's about nine degrees fahrenheit, or for those of you across the pond, about minus twelve, so it's a bit chilly outside.
There's ice on the nine fahrenheit. You know, Ben, I discovered just today that the the Celsia scale begins with the freezing point of water. I did not know that the fahrenheit scale zero is the freezing point of brine. You maybe knew that.
I did not know that either. So it is at least based on something as opposed to haphazard, which is what it seems like for everything else in the imperial system.
It is based on something. But anyway, look, we're digressing already, and we shouldn't. Last time we spoke, I told you about a nineteenth century Champagne baroness. This time we're going to leap forward in history. This is a twentieth century story. It's a very twentieth century story. I have to say, how how tech savvy are you? Ben?
In absolute termors are a relative to my kids.
We're all well behind the co relative to our kids. But you know, you know, you know which way up is in a computer.
For a fifty something gentlemen, I think I do, okay. I mean we certainly. I work an tech forward business, so I keep up with the latest on most things.
I mean I feel reasonably text having. Actually, you compared yourself to your kids. I compare myself to my parents. My mother was a computer hacker, and my dad worked in information technology his entire life.
Wait, Tim, your mum was a hacker. You got to say a little more. You can't just let that hang there.
I mean, I make it sound very dramatic. I mean she was just one of these great computer enthusiasts in the nineteen eighties we had. We had lots of these kind of classic nineteen eighties computers around the house, and she would take them apart and put them back together. And I think I can probably say this, I mean, she's long dead, no one's going to come for her. She would just strip off the copy protection on these computer games. So she would say, well, I'm not paying
all this money to buy you a computer game. If I get the computer game, take off the copy protection, make a copy of the computer game, and then send the computer game back to the library, or give it back to your friend or whoever you borrowed it from. So yeah, she would. I mean, she wasn't like cracking into the Pentagon or anything like that, but even they,
I think pale into insignificance. With the text saviness of the entrepreneur that I want to tell you about today, Steve Shirley, she really saw two huge gaps in the way people thought about the computer industry. And she and you may be wondering, Steve, as she will get to that she faced absolutely astonishing challenges during her life, right from the beginning of her life, and I think her story can teach us a lot about success and about resilience in the face of failure.
So you ready to go, Yeah, I can't wait to hear about it.
Before we get to her incredible story and your take on her experience. Here is the theme music. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary Tales. Steve Shirley was born in nineteen thirty three, and she wasn't called Steve Shirley. She was called Vera Buchtal. She was born in Germany in nineteen thirty three, which, okay, instantly a problem.
Tough time.
Yeah, and she was Jewish, so her father was a judge in Dortmund. So first the Bokschial family moved to Vienna, and then shortly before the Second World War broke out, Vera's father decided they had to get their two daughters out of the Nazi sphere of influence. They were put on this train. This is one of the Kinder transport trains. So you've got a couple of thousand children on this train which went all the way from Vienna to Britain.
So this was Vera. So Steve Shirley, age five, her older sister who was nine, and they were fostered in Shropshire in the northwest of England. Her parents actually survived the war, but the family didn't survive the trauma of
this experience. So Steve later said that she felt she had been completely rejected and abandoned by her parents, And of course it was only later that she realized quite what they'd gone through and what a difficult decision they had made, the most loving thing any parent could have done. But that is the first few years of Steve Shirley's life. I mean, what a start.
Yeah, what a difficult way to start your life. The trauma that it must cause at that age to not understand what it's all about and to be starting your life over, I can't imagine.
It does defy imagination. She did reflect on this later, and one of the things she said was that she had this survivor's guilt and she felt that her life had been saved in this spectacular way, and that she then wanted to live a life that had been worth saving. So she really felt this need to justify her existence and her survival, and as we'll see, I think she really did.
She sounds like a fascinating woman already, and she hasn't done anything yet.
Buckle up because there's a lot to this story. So Steve, she was still Ververa at the time. Steve grew up in Shropshire. She loved she loved Shropshire. She found the town very welcoming of these immigrant children, refugee children. She did well at school, she learned fluent English, and she was really passionate about maths. And the problem was they didn't teach maths to girls, and so she had to fight for special permission to go to learn maths at
the nearby boys' school. And the reaction of the boys was I think a preparation for the rest of her life. In fact, what did they do? Cat calling, whistling, heckling. The boys were not kind, but she wanted to learn maths. She powered through it. You'll see she powers through a lot of things. She became a British citizen at the age of eighteen, and she took the name at Stephanie Brook. And she decided not to go to university, even though
she was clearly very bright. And do you want to guess why she didn't go to university.
She couldn't afford it. I mean, sorry, I know that's a very American answer, But.
That's a very American answer. I think she probably would would have been fine on that count. The issue was she wanted to study science, and there may have been some science courses available to women, but she could only find one. And do you want to guess what was the science that they let young women study. Any guesses nursing. It was botany, so the girls could study the pretty flowers. Anyway, she didn't want to study botany. She wanted to study
maths or physics or something engineering. She didn't see any opportunity to do that, and so she just went straight to get a job and she got a job at the post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill.
Where is Dollis Hill?
Good question, it's just part of northwest London. But the post Office Research Station this is the male but they're also plugged into telecommunications, so they're doing this cutting edge research in computing. And she is operating basically as an assistant. She's doing maths, she's doing calculations. She also took a math degree in evening classes and she got a promotion and she started working on electronic computers.
This is in the fifties term.
This is in the late fifties. Computers are these huge, mechanical, very expensive constructions, but they are moving rapidly. They're clearly going to be very important.
This is in the days of any AC in UNIVAC and all the big mainframes. Yeah.
Absolutely, And indeed some of the people at Dollis Hill were involved with Colossus, one of the very first computers.
Yeah. Sure.
Unfortunately, the computers were great, her colleagues were not great. She recorded being bullied, being harassed, being groped as a matter of course, obviously being paid less than the men to do the same job. On the plus side, not only did she like the computers, she found love there. So she met a physicist called Derek Shirley. So this is nineteen fifty nine. She is now Stephanie Shirley, and so she leaves the Post Office Research Center. She gets a job at a company called CDL.
I've never heard of CDL. If you google it, I don't think any other you find anything relevant.
Computer developments limited, as you can imagine, an awful lot of computer companies that existed in the nineteen fifties no longer exist. Yeah, it's a fairly small place. She was the chief programmer there. She loved the work, she loved the colleagues, but she realized that there was a glass ceiling there. So she quit after two years because she said, it was quite clear to me that I couldn't progress far.
Yeah, so she was frustrated.
She realizes she's basically not going to win playing the game by their rules, so she's going to have to make up her own rules. And she's now twenty nine years old and she decides to start her own business.
Probably also unusual for a woman at the time.
Especially a business in computing, which is what she wanted to do. So, I mean, you've worked with lots of entrepreneurs, support lots of businesses. What are the key ingredients for starting our business? Would you say?
Obviously number one is an idea, So you haven't an idea of what you want to do and why you think there'll be product market fit for it. You need access to capital for sure.
Yeah, she's got six pounds of capital.
Okay, so you know, short, short on that front. And then you know the third things connections you know, leads to initial clients, initial employees, a network that can support the ecosystem you're trying to build.
Well, she's got a new baby and a kitchen table. I don't know if that works as a substitute. You said, you need an idea. She's got a very good idea. So actually she's got two very good ideas. So idea number one. And this is really radical. So at the time, you know, this is now about nineteen sixty computers are big, but software is not really an industry. So software is a thing that you just get packaged along with your hardware.
Sure, the hardware runs the software, and that's all it is.
Yeah, and it's a it's a sort of a joint deal. But she realizes, well, hang on, there's a lot more that you can do with these computers if you write your own programs. And so she realizes that standalone software to run on these huge computers, that's going to be a thing. And so she basically sets up a software company. And think about it. This is now, it's about twenty years roughly twenty years before Bill Gates sets up Microsoft and becomes for a time the richest man in the world.
So she is well ahead of that particular curve.
I mean, it sounds like she's one of the mothers of the software industry.
Really, absolutely, she is she has a second realization, which is that there are a lot of people like her. Well, there's nobody really like her, but there are a lot of smart women. A lot of those women are involved in the computer industry. It later became very male dominated, but lots of lots of women who are kind of around, who can code, but are basically being pushed into intellectually
demanding but organizationally subservient roles. So they're smart, and they're being underpaid, and they're being undervalued, and if her experience is anything to go by, they're also being harassed and groped in the office. And so why doesn't she for this new company, why doesn't she tap into this underappreciated workforce of women programmers. So that that's what she did.
She said, I had a gut feeling there was a programming industry of some kind waiting to be born, and I liked the idea of being in at its birth.
Wow, I mean that is that is something else. I mean, that's quite an intellectual leap. It's easy to look back now and say it's obvious, but at the time I can imagine it wasn't at all to most people.
No, absolutely, So she's got this. She's got this great idea for a product, which is software. She's got a great idea for how to make this product, which is to hire lots of frustrated women programmers. So there's a third leap that she takes, which is ben you ever heard of working from home?
Yes, I confess I'm not much of a fan. I get nothing done at home. It's not for me. I know it's great for some people, but it's just it's not my bag.
Well, Steve Shirley was a fan. Again, this is like nineteen fifty nine, nineteen sixty, so this is so far ahead of the curve. But she realizes that a lot of these women have the domestic responsibilities. So a lot of them are mothers like her. A lot of them our housewives, so they've got these domestic duties. But actually, to be a programmer at the time, you don't actually need the computer. You need a pencil and paper because code is not that big. So a lot of these
women are writing code on their kitchen table. So yeah, you just need a telephone, pen and paper and away you go. So she calls her company freelance programmers, and how do you reckon?
It?
Goes in the first few months.
I mean, first of all, it sounds like it was the world's first gig job. Yeh, first software company, almost first gig job. She really was ahead of her time. I mean, my guess is the hardest thing was probably selling. But maybe I'm wrong.
No, you are not wrong. Selling was a huge problem. And you want to know why selling was a huge problem because all of the customers were getting these letters from this woman called Stephanie trying to sell them software, and they were like, okay, first of all, well software is not a thing, and second, we don't buy product
from girls. Sure, And this is why we are calling her Steve Shirley because her husband rather brilliantly said why don't you just sign your letters Steve instead of Stephanie, And that's what she did, and the way she recalls she said, it seemed to me that things really picked up once I stopped signing myself Stephanie and started signing the letters Steve.
Yeah. I can look it's looking back, it seems, you know, horrific. But even today, you see when people look at names, when they look at resumes, when they look at pitches, everybody has their own unconscious or conscious bias, and back then, the very conscious bias was this was for the world of men.
I mean, there are experiments run by economists and another social scientists where they send out resumes and they just they swap the name on the top of the resume. So it's a distinctively male name, or a distinctively female name, or maybe a distinctively white name, or a name that's most commonly associated with people from an ethnic minority, an immigrant name, and you know, depressingly enough, it makes a
huge difference. People are more likely to invite job applicants in for interviews if they appear to be white guys. So she saw all that and she worked around it.
I find myself a bit torn because, you know, in today's world, we would say, you know, oh, that's a shame. She had to hide who she really was to be successful, and isn't that tragic, But back then there was no other way, and so I actually, you know, deep down, have a lot of respect for it.
Yeah. Also, she didn't hide who she was for that long because she would of course the inviter in from eatings and then she'd show up wearing a fur coat. She thought the fur coat was important to could have maintained this idea that the company was doing well. And she said once once you're through the door, there's there's a moment of surprise. But then she very often would
make the sale. There was one other little piece of deception she she adopted, which is that she would play she had a tape recording of you know, office sounds like, you know, typing and things like that phone's ringing, And so if she was on the phone to a potential client, she'd just be playing this tape recorder so that it drowned out the washing machine, the baby crying, and you had the typing and the telephone instead.
It is clever. That's that's the that's the the modern version of that is the blurred out zoom background.
Absolutely. Yes. So so yeah, she gets some clients and things go well. They work for the company that designs the supersonic airplane Concord. So this company programmed their black box flight recorder. They provided software for Rolls Royce, for British Rail, for NATO.
So she's got big institutional clients.
She's got great clients and that idea. You said, Ben, that the having the idea is important. She has proved that the idea works, there are difficult moments. So in the nineteen seventies, the UK was hit by a pretty bad recession and really squeezed the company, and Steve was being squeezed on the home front as well. So her son had been born and it quickly became apparent that he was autistic and he needed an enormous amount of support.
He has very complex needs and yeah, he'd sometimes be violent, and meanwhile Steve is trying to run this business which is running into a cash flow crisis. Things got very, very tough. Steve had a bit of a breakdown. She needed a lot of support, but then she bounced back from that and one of the things that she did was to set up a home for young people with autism with lots of support needs that not only her son Giles could live there, but other young people who
had similar needs could also live there. So she's starting to take steps into the world of philanthropy as well. The other thing that's working is this plan to recruit women. So the first of the first three hundred employees two hundred and ninety seven are women, and she only has
to change that. In nineteen seventy five, the UK government introduces the Sex Discrimination Act, generally designed to prevent hiring men in favor of women, but of course it applies equally, so at that point she has to let the men in. But by then the company is a huge success. The business model, this kind of hybrid working, the supplying of software, it's all going great. And yeah, so she takes that in her stride.
Wow, I mean, she's resilient, if nothing else, but to be able to do all that, get through that tough time at home, that tough time at work, keep the company crowing, keep it going, change the business model fundamentally because of the laws. That's quite a journey.
It's an incredible journey.
Can I ask, I'm just curious what did she go by Steve socially as well? Or did she go by Stephanie socially?
She went by Steve. So my wife met her well a few years ago. In fact, this is this is I came to hear of her because my wife met her and was hugely impressed by her. So this is why we're having this conversation at all. Ben. So, my
wife's a portrait photographer. She makes these beautiful photographic portraits of the great and the good, and she heard about Steve Shirley at some photographic launch and she contacted Steve and said, I would love to come and meet you and make a portrait of you and hear your story. So this was about six or seven years ago. At this time, Steve was I think, you know, in her mid eighties, and she just said, this woman is incredible, incredible.
She was at the time Dame Stephanie Shirley. And yeah, pretty much the first thing she said to my ab what wife, was call me Steve.
Wow. So what became of the company.
So the company went public in nineteen ninety three?
Oh wow.
Yeah. So at that point Steve was worth a couple one hundred million dollars. Seventy of her workers became millionaires. So all these early programmers who had been given equity, they all became millionaires. So this is all This is the kind of story you hear a lot about, you know, after the in Silicon Valley. But this is not Silicon Valley. This is all happening in rural England in the nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies. So she creates all these female millionaires and
it is eventually bought by a larger software company. And she is left in the nineteen nineties with a fourune and also with a lot of grief because her son, Giles dies at the age of thirty five, leaving her and her husband absolutely bereft. She's got this loss, and she's got a lot of money, and that's then the next three decades of her life, which is trying to figure out how to give it away. So yeah, she spends thirty five years making the money and then almost
as much time giving it away. And she said she was determined not to leave some big foundation or trust fund. She wanted to give the money away while she could.
It was sort of like Act three of her life. I mean, Act one was the resettlement to the UK. Act two was her building this company and raising a son despite the adversity, and then Act three was finding a way to take all that success and give back to the society that had heard support.
Absolutely. She founded Oxford University's Internet Institute, for example. She gave the founding grant to that, but a lot of the money was given to autism charities, or rather was used to set up autism charities that just didn't exist and needed to exist. So a school, Priors Court School,
this residential home that I mentioned. She also set up Autistica, which was a national autism research charity in the UK, and she also gave money to refugee charities reflecting her experience as a refugee, and became the UK's ambassador for philanthropy, and she wrote several books. So it's really an astonishing life. She had always said she wanted to live a life that had been worth saving and wow, I mean wow. And she died in August last year at the age
of ninety one. So I don't know think looking back at all of those all of those achievements and all those obstacles overcome, I mean, what are your thoughts?
I would say, first of all, the amount of grit when we meet with entrepreneurs who have gotten through this type of adversity, and although this is at a potentially at a different level tim than what we see typically, but still we see a few common traits. And one is they are rarely driven fundamentally by money.
Yeah, and she was never interested in money.
I think that doesn't surprise me. The second is they have incredible passion for the underlying business that they're creating, whatever it is. And then third they have a mental resilience that just exceeds the norm. And I think it takes all three of those to be one of these stories of someone who is able to overcome this much hardship, this much adversity, and build something of real scale and value.
I think that's absolutely right. And on the subject of money, she said, the money I have let go has brought me infinitely more joy than the money I've hung onto. There was another point that she made in interviews. She lived to the age of ninety one. We've just been talking about her for a few minutes, and you telescope everything into this short period of time, and it seems as though everything's happening at once, and of course at the time it's not necessarily like that. This overnight success
that she had, in fact took thirty years. And she said, I've learned that progress generally comes from making a series of small steps rather than a giant leap. I've also learned it's fine to make mistakes. The trick is to make them only once and learn from them, which is a very cautionary tales lesson.
What a fascinating woman and a fascinating story.
There's more we could say, but I think we're out of time, So Ben Walter, it's been great talking to you. Thank you so much for joining me on caution Retales.
Thanks for having me Tim, and thanks for sharing such a terrific story.
This episode was sponsored by Chase for Business. I was joined by Ben Walter, the CEO of Chase for Business. His podcast is The Unshakables. Season three has just gone live and you can find it, of course, wherever you get your podcasts. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Bend A.
Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Messe Munroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It really does make a difference to us.
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